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Coloring the Invisible

[Johnny Strange, a World War II veteran,] went to a lousy war movie. In it some green Navy kid, stranded in Bataan, kept letting the spoons fly off of hand grenades and counting to three before he threw them, usually just across a coconut log where evil-looking Japanese were shooting point-blank at him. It was so outrageous that finally about halfway through he had to leave. As he walked up the aisle he looked at the faces of the people bathed in the flickering light from the screen as they chewed handfuls of popcorn and watched the fighting with avid eyes, and for a brief insane moment he wished he had two or three grenades with him, to toss in among them. And see how they liked it.
— James Jones, Whistle

P A R T    O N E
Blacker Blacks and Whiter Whites

+ Part Two: Lies About the Good Old Days, During the War
+ Part Three: A Tour of the East River

If the third millennium hasn't turned out the way you'd hoped and you'd rather go back to the second, you're in luck. The days when theatrical re-releases were commonplace seemed to be gone for a while there, done in by the advent of home video, but now several major Hollywood studios — not generally known for their habit of getting retro — have seized upon the new year as an opportunity to remind us of the past. On the last day of 2000, Warner Brothers plans to trip us all out by putting 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) back in theaters, just in time for it to inaugurate the year in which it was set, and Paramount and Universal Studios have also joined in, dusting off Rear Window (1954) for the big screen. This is happening about ten months sooner than the 2001 event. In fact, Rear Window's it's been out for a few weeks in New York and Los Angeles's fancier theaters, and as of mid-February, it will grace fancier theaters around the country.

Rear Window's theatrical rerelease is, among other things, a showcase for mainstream moviedom's emergent special effects technologies. Universal is trotting out Rear Window to show off a dye process, originally experimented with in the 1970s, for restoring colors to film negatives that have faded with age. Once prohibitively expensive and imperfect, this process has been revamped and was recently used on Hitchcock's Vertigo. Frank Ricotta, one of Technicolor's vice-presidents, says that it has provided Rear Window with "blacker blacks" and "whiter whites" than the movie has ever had before — even when it was first released.

In the frenzy to improve upon originals, no one seems to have bothered to ask whether Rear Window's blacks and whites were already black and white enough back in 1954. The way in which 2001 has been improved upon is yet to be revealed, but I wake up in a cold sweat some nights, having had my usual recurring nightmare of a 2001: Special Edition in which the monolith has a computer-generated halo around it, courtesy of Industrial Light and Magic, and HAL has been re-engineered to be cute and plucky, like C3P0 or the freakish child robot from the 80s TV series Small Wonder. These days, it seems even Hollywood realizes that it's no use trying to preserve the past.

Although touch-ups often irritate the hardcore cinema traditionalists among us (these would be the same people who handcuffed themselves randomly to Tinseltown landmarks every time Ted Turner colorized one of his Golden Oldies), maybe people aren't questioning Technicolor's project because it really isn't possible to resurrect the Rear Window of 1954. Frank Ricotta — at least implicitly — admits as much when he claims that the new Rear Window has a wider color spectrum than the original. One has to wonder where all these exciting new colors came from. It's not like Hitchcock's set exists somewhere on an abandoned Paramount lot, waiting for someone to come along and refilm it with better cameras.

No, it's much more likely that the people at Universal and Technicolor made their new colors up as they went along. This is why Vice President Ricotta doesn't even pretend that Universal ever intended to "restore" the film to its "original" form. Should you come away from this new Rear Window with the impression that Lars Thorwald has a tan you don't remember seeing in the unrestored version, for instance, it's possible that this is a deliberate intervention on the part of the people who have restored the film. Such a theory would be tricky to confirm, though, since nobody ever bothered to quantify Raymond Burr's hue and saturation in writing back when Rear Window was in production. Without such data, and having a negative of Rear Window that the Los Angeles Times says looks like it might have once been used to line a birdcage, the technicians at Technicolor are left to depend upon their best guesses, and we are left to guess what has been truly restored, and what Universal might have substituted for palette information that simply does not exist anymore.

Dusk in Rear Window's artificial universe seems far more richly copper than any of the sunsets I've ever seen in my daily life. But it's hard to say whether its exaggerated tones are a result of Hitchcock's efforts to recreate an exterior courtyard on an interior soundstage, or whether they're the doing of the restorers, overcompensating for the dull, washed-out sunset in the film's negative. In any case maybe it doesn't matter so much. Hitchcock's sunset is certainly brighter than it would be in an apartment building on Ninth Street in Manhattan. Even as it investigates the way in which images are reordered by the cameras that take them, reimagined by the eyes that look on them, Rear Window has always had the Technicolor gloss of a magazine, the amplified brightness of a still life.